No woman is heterosexual. What men call heterosexuality is an institution where men make women captive for PIV, to control our reproductive functions and steal our labour. Heterosexuality, or sexuality with men does not exist, because the only relationship to men that exists is men’s violence, physical and mental invasion – one that men have so well crafted and disguised for so long that we can mistake it for attraction, sexual urges or love. All women’s “attraction” to men is 100% eroticised trauma bonding / stockholm syndrome. There is no other form of attraction to men possible than that. None. Any woman “sexually” or “sentimentally” attached to a man is ONLY trauma-bonded to him. This is a universal rule under patriarchy.

[To clarify, I use trauma-bonding and stockholm syndrome (or societal stockholm syndrome) interchangeably. To me it’s the same thing that’s being described, except that I find that the word ‘trauma-bonding’ more accurately defines the context of violence + response to it than a word with “Stockholm” and “syndrome” in it. It’s clear: you bond as a reaction to violence-trauma.]

As a historical note, the term “heterosexuality” only started to be used in the late 19th century by the male psycho contingents and was first coined by a German man apparently (this is in the context of Freudian psychoanalytical backlash against women). It was invented to replace the term “normalsexual” – which was probably too overtly political – and to oppose it to “homosexual”. The men in the psychogenocidal departments invented it for the following purposes:

pathologise lesbianism (and homosexuality) and treat it as a deviance to be cured punished. / pathologise women who resisted PIV and marriage and chose to bond with women instead;

define men’s sexual ownership of women as the norm (= their use of women as dick holes and breeders = rape /impregnation / forced childbearing /abuse);

define men’s sexual ownership of women as a “sexuality” and “sexual orientation” so to hide the violence of it;

naturalise it, that is, define it as a natural biological drive in both men AND women.

If we look at the etymology of the term:

Heteros = different (from the greek).

Sexuality = sexuality.

So the literal meaning of heterosexuality = sexual orientation/ attraction / practice of sexual & love relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Does the word “heterosexuality” define the reality of our relationship to men in patriarchy? Nope. We need to stop using that word and the word “straight” when referring to women occupied by men, because it’s incorrect. I also often see the term “heteronormativity” flying around. This applies only to men. Women are within no norm in the “hetero” world, because we’re not the beneficiary subjects of it, we’re the primary victims and targets of it. !!

Back to where I started. We really need to know and understand how our traumatic responses to men work. I see some feminists wondering why women would still be attracted to men after becoming feminist, why they would stay around to “date” them. They don’t understand why these women would remain “het” if they’ve been able to see how dangerous men are. Not to mention those who believe the only reason women stay with men is for supposed “benefits” – forgetting along the way that forced proximity (captivity) to men + PIV/male violence is THE definition of our oppression and that there is no way we can benefit from it! None at all, ever ever! To believe that, is to believe MEN’S anti-woman lies that oppression is good or natural for us. That we can somehow enjoy it, want it or cope with it. This is a lie; it’s not feminist to believe that, it doesn’t fit our reality at all. Really, this is basic understanding of how men’s violence and brainwashing operate.

Men know how we react to their violence and deliberately manipulate our responses to increase their control over us, and to decrease the efforts it takes them to do so. It’s in men’s interest to disguise their violence as much as possible. It’s not for nothing that modern western patriarchy has perfected “psycho” and “behavioural” (brainwashing and mind-control) sciences for centuries as a powerful anti-women’s liberation tool, and that men rely so heavily on it to keep us at their knees, or rather, below their dicks. It’s part of the global male infrastructure that ensures men a constant supply of ready-tamed and pre-possessed women to effortlessly stick their dicks in, impregnate and abuse. The more it grows, the easier it is for each individual man to break any woman’s will and trick her into PIV and being owned by him – and maintain submission level with the help of men’s institutions.

And so to groom women into “heterosexuality”, the most efficient form of mind-control they found is to traumatise women from birth through parental/family/child (often sexual) abuse – and from then on, use this traumatic memory/PTSD to abuse women without women being aware of it (or of the extent of it). The point is to drive the abuse directly into our unconscious, making it impossible for us to escape it because we’re no longer able to perceive men’s abuse as abusive at the conscious level. In other words, the strategy is to program us to respond to men’s violence through dissociation and trauma-bonding, and cloak/rename these responses as “love” or “attraction” to men – so on the top of it they make us believe we want it.

Let’s recall what trauma-bonding is: if we look at Dee Graham’s work (p.4, Loving to Survive), for a woman to trauma-bond to a man:

she must perceive her captor – the man – as having powers of life and death over her

she must believe that she cannot escape, and that therefore her life depends on her captor

she must be isolated from outsiders so that his perspective is the only perspective available

she must feel as if her captor – the man – showed her some kindness or attention.

This situation of captor-to-hostage is the situation of all women to all men. (This is also the point that D.G. makes in her book). That is, all men hold all women captive. All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men. We are forced to depend on men and male infrastructures for our survival. Men’s perspective (and men’s language that names their perspective) is the only perspective available and we are isolated from other women and woman-centred perspectives. Not all men rape / abuse us at all times – a man just being polite might cause us to feel grateful and t-b.

So just by looking at the reality of men’s domination of women, it holds that emotional or sexual attachment to men can always only be trauma-bonding, because for it not tobe trauma-bonding, men would have to not be our oppressors. But there’s more to this than what Dee Graham says, so I’m building on her theory here.

The reason so many of us trauma-bond so instantly and intensely to men in our proximity and sometimes to just any man that crosses our way, whether we are lesbian, celibate, separatist or “het”, is that we are programmed and groomed to react in this way to male threat since birth. The key to understanding this is dissociation, since trauma-bonding is a form of dissociation; so before I continue into the female child-grooming theory i’ll explain what I mean by dissociation and why trauma-bonding is a form of dissociation. Sorry if it’s a bit long but I have yet to find a shorter way of explaining it.

Dissociation is a normal survival reaction to intentional, human(male) violence. The condition for dissociation is when we perceive we can’t escape the violence, and are “frozen” on the spot. Most if not all men’s violence against women fits this criteria, because it takes place within a context of captivity to men. The closer and more dependent on the abuser we are, the more we will have to dissociate, especially at young age, especially if the abuse is ongoing. Also, the more the violence is socially hidden, unnamed, denied or renamed as something else, the more likely we are to dissociate from it, because we can’t connect our response to the situation (we feel bad but can’t perceive the violence as violence). This is a mindfuck which causes freeze fright, and dissociation.

Dissociation is when, in a situation of being trapped in violence, the brain creates a neuronal short-circuit so we don’t die of stress. Stress/fear is a normal reaction to an endangering, unsafe situation and means that adrenalin and cortisol gets sent to the heart and brain to react fast, think fast and get away fast. If we can’t make sense of the danger and get away from it, the brain shuts everything down to stop the emergency reaction from continuing (the sending of adrenalin + cortisol) because otherwise it could intoxicate our body and we can die from it. The brain then sends some other drugs (close to endorphin and Ketamine) to create an amnesia or blank in the mind, and to numb the pain. This is dissociation. Other ways of sending these dissociative drugs than directly from the brain is through genital arousal, trauma-bonding, or by taking external drugs such as alcohol or other anaesthetisers. Dissociation is what causes the traumatic memory, that is, unconscious memory of the violence which remains stuck in the lymphatic system (short-term memory place) because of the short-circuit – it couldn’t connect to the other parts of the brain anymore to get into the long-term memory, where we store our experiences and can learn from them. The memory never being processed, it comes back to us in invasive ways – either through flashes, dreams, sensations, or in more cryptic ways such as with somatic disorders, re-enacting similar trauma with other people, etc.

So yes, dissociation works like a DRUG, whether as an internal biological/chemical function or with the help of external products, when the internal one is no longer strong enough to numb the pain. This means that we may become addicted to the dissociation, and therefore the violence that triggers the dissociative state might become addictive too. And men make sure that the only available activities for women are violent and dissociative: from PIV to mutilating “femininity” practices to social binge drinking to traumatic relationships or workaholism, etc.

When we think of dissociation we imagine extreme torture and then feeling outside of our body, or feeling high: even if it can be that, very often it may be as simple as having a blank in the mind after seeing a misogynist advert, or forgetting the conversation you were having as you saw a man sexually harass his “girlfriend”, or feeling aroused when you come across a man that looks like the one you’ve previously trauma-bonded to / or who previously abused you, or having the urge to drink a glass of beer after some men insulted you (just to give some random examples). Because men’s violence is present in our everyday lives, so is dissociation, but most often we don’t realise how disconnected we are until we reconnect again some way or another and become more aware of the violence.

Now to heterosexuality and dissociation. Relationships with men or any sexual intention from their part is, when not repulsive and making you want to run away – necessarily dissociative and trauma-bonding. That’s because of the combined violence/perceived niceness inherent in “heterosexuality” (+ points 1, 2 and 3 from Grahams’s conditions for stockholm syndrome).

To trauma-bond, on top of everything D.G said, there needs to be actual violence or threat of violence, not just the perception of it. Our perceptions and responses never trick us, we only trauma-bond to people who represent a real threat or within an unequal, unsafe setting. Being around any man constitutes a threat to us, because they are our oppressors. Being wanted by a man and him treating you as if you were his is inherently violent. That’s anything from him showing he wants you, “dating” with you, being in a relationship or married to him. In either case, it consists in some kind of physical or mental violation from his part, on top of the constant threat of PIV/rape he represents as a man, whether he decides to enforce it or not.

Second, men brainwash women into believing that a man wanting us is positive attention. Worse, we are persuaded that we can’t EXIST, be happy and whole if a man doesn’t want us. They conduct heavy brainwashing on girls and women to force the perspective that PIV isn’t rape but “sex”, that sexual harassment is “seduction”, “courting” and men owning us is “love”, “romance”. We are to actively seek men to want us and this should be at the centre of all our worries and activities. And no matter how violent he is when he wants us, it means he likes me. We should be grateful.

Because of this, anything within “heterosexuality” from men merely being polite in our presence to “dating”, to buying us a drink to regular PIV/rape to brutally attacking us may cause a similar reaction of trauma-bonding (depending on how groomed to it we are in the first place) because if he wants us, it means positive attention. And a man “liking us” means EXISTING, being saved, rescued from non-existence or near death. And so we may feel grateful for that attention even if it was horrendous, horribly destructive – we may go back to him because we feel guilty not to show our gratitude for that attention. We feel obligated to thank him. We are left to blame ourselves for the awfulness of the experience, because there is no other explanation available to us. It’s our fault if it felt wrong, we just chose the wrong guy, we’re not liberated enough to enjoy it, we didn’t do enough to please him, etc.

This means that male sexualised invasion (heterosexuality) is essentially a mindfuck. The violent/nice aspect of it is inherent to heterosexuality. What’s perceived as nice IS the act of invasion itself, there is no separation between the perceived acts of niceness and the violence here. So if we’re made dependent on male sexual violence, perceived as positive attention, it is experienced only through a dissociated state. We can’t experience the violence on a conscious level because we can’t see why it makes us feel awful despite the “love/attraction” (Trauma-b.). We know we feel bad but we can’t connect it to the situation because it can only mean positive attention. And there is nothing, nobody to confirm the reality of this violence. We can only deny, suppress our responses and dissociate from it – and blame ourselves for feeling bad. It’s a mindfuck because it’s a paradox: the thing we are told is supposed to do most good to us, what we are supposed to cling on for life and seek forever, is exactly what does most harm to us. On one hand our existence is made to depend on being wanted by a man, but on the other our existence is endangered by being around with this man. If we can’t make sense of it, we stay trapped, freeze fright, and trauma-bond to the man.

So because of this nice/violent mindfuck nature of male sexual invasion (heterosexuality), dissociation is almost automatic, and it takes the form of trauma-bonding. We flip to this TB state in men’s presence all the more automatically if we were “drugged” on it for years, especially if we had lots of PIV/rape that caused genital arousal, which increases the intensity of TB tenfold (the intensity of TB and dissociation is always proportionate to the violence). It intoxicates us and we immediately lose our senses, it’s like being driven outside of our body. It’s like being an empty shell filled up by him, clinging on to him even if he’s a bastard. It instantly creates a state of melancholia because we’re driven outside of ourselves, but because we’re colonised by the guy we think it’s because we’re missing HIM. In fact we’re missing ourself and it feels very painful, like you’re being eaten up from the inside. This is the ongoing genocide of women by men. Even though they kill many of us, they need us alive and tied to them so they can keep using for PIV/reproduction, so what they do is kill us from the inside as much as they possibly can, drive us outside of our bodies, into exile from ourselves.

This automatic trauma-bonding reaction to men that we might mistake for sexual urges or falling in love is one of the main reasons separatism from men is so important. As long as men are our oppressors and probably as long as they have dicks, they will be a threat so the only way to prevent TB from happening is to avoid any close contact with men. if we TB, it’s not in our control, especially if we were heavily “drugged” on TB / PIV before. Choosing to be only around with women isn’t a special identity or a VIP radfem status that other lesser feminists have to attain, it’s a matter of protection. Even after several years of not interacting with men any more and choosing to love only women, I still get invasive flashes and dreams of PIV/rape, and I still TB to men if I can’t avoid them and they’re “friendly”. I hope it will dissipate more over time though.

The reason we may switch to TB to men so quickly in the first place though, instead of other forms of dissociation or being horrified by what boys and men are and avoiding them like the plague, is really because men program us to react in that way to abuse from since we are born, and by the time we’re grown up, this mechanism becomes like a second skin. TB to parents/fathers, more than any other form of dissociation, is the primary template to which we are raised as girls, which men then build on to abuse us as adult women. It would be completely impossible for men to subordinate us the way they do without parental/men’s abuse of girls.

now please enjoy my super diagram on child grooming!

Some notes on the diagram: the centre of the circle is the core, bare minimum of child abuse inherent in the patriarchal “family”. IOW the conditions in which women give birth to girls are inherently abusive in patriarchy. We are owned by a woman who’s owned and abused herself by a man.

Basically with girls we have the same configuration, the same paradox as with heterosexuality where the very people who we’re emotionally and physically dependent on to survive are those who are endangering our life, attacking our integrity through treating us as possessions, lack of care, neglect and abuse. We can’t escape our parents: abandonment effectively means death. We are terrorised of being further harmed or abandoned.

Because there is no way as a baby, infant or child to make sense of this mindfuck violence as the reality of it is never named or confirmed, as we are utterly alone with our suffering and powerless in this situation, our instinctual reaction is to trauma-bond to our parents and blame ourselves for their mistreatment. We think that if they don’t take care of me or treat me badly, it’s because they don’t like me, because I’m bad, I’m not lovable, I’m a stain, I’m disposable, I’m a monster inside, I’m not worth being loved and protected, I’m a bad girl.Winning our parents’ approval and pleasing them, desperately wanting to be “loved” by them and dissociating from the neglect or abuse is a survival reaction.

This abusive captivity to owners (parents) is called family and love, and we are supposed to be forever grateful to our parents.

To this captivity/trauma-bonding we add patriarchal “education”, often administered from birth, which consists in suppressing in the child any expressions of anger, distress (which is always justified) or individual will, through punishments and rewards. If a child cries or screams, to express normal needs or protest her condition, she has to be “corrected” by being shouted at, scorned, finger wagged, put in a corner or beaten. She might also be rewarded by attention or good marks for being obedient. Then adults deny us the right to express any anger or resistance to this treatment, because “it’s for our own good”. This is the slow but steady grooming to dissociate from violence – being punished for reacting to the violence, and the reality of the violence being constantly denied, we learn to suppress our normal responses to abuse and our capacity to defend ourselves from it. We learn to fragment our minds and experience the ongoing violence only on an unconscious level, to survive. The more extreme the violence, as in with severe psychological, sexual or physical abuse, the more we live in dissociation.

To this, of course, we add steady grooming to sexually service men and brainwashing into PIV, constant sexual harassment and abuse from men in general, mutilating femininity practices and general hatred of females.

This is the template on which grooming to heterosexuality is fixed. I think the reason we can so easily switch to trauma-bonding to men, experience men’s approval as such a matter of life or death, perceive that our self-worth is so dependent on somebody else’s external attention even if they are repugnant oafs, is because this is how we learned to live and survive as a child, from birth. Then we simply continue to adapt in this way to male violence as we grow, we know no other way to react to abuse. The system of captivity to parents is the same as with male ownership / relationships to men. Same isolation, same captivity, same need to dissociate / TB from ongoing abuse, etc. There’s no way we would dissociate so easily from men’s abuse were it not for this treatment as girls. There’s no way we would go near men at all.

So, all these words to explain in every way possible that heterosexuality doesn’t exist and our “urges” to bond with them emotionally or sexually aren’t natural drives but normal PTSD reactions to years of abuse and mind-programming.

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The reason this post is so long is because not everyone is on the same page wrt definitions of trauma-bonding, PTSD, dissociation and girl child abuse, so I wanted to make sure women understood what I meant with those terms.

Basically for exactly the same reasons all PIV is rape, all “love” relationships with men are necessarily within a context of oppression. For that not to be the case, you’d have to prove a man isn’t an oppressor. That’s impossible, because each man is part of the oppressor class.

for us to bond with men instead of running very, very far away from them, and to believe that men’s violence can be an equal, reciprocal loving relationship, we really have to be downtrodden and brainwashed for years by men. Saying this isn’t insulting to women IMO, it proves how strong we are and that it takes men years and decades and generations and generations of violence against women to achieve this amount of subordination. Oh I haven’t even mentioned intergeneration terror hear, and that PTSD can be genetically transmitted through generations. PTSD modifies the genes and it means women transmit these genes to the next generation. It doesn’t mean it can’t be healed but it’s more difficult to heal obviously because it’s not part of our own memory, it’s in the cellular memory.

Every single male organisation, institution and infrastructure, from the military to the state to medecine, church language and the rest, is there to groom us into being owned by men, and to groom us into PIV. If we don’t comply to “heterosexuality”, we are punished. Lesbianism is punished, PIV resistance, marriage resistance, spinsterism is punished. Radical feminism is about looking at structures, at male patterns of violence and how they apply to all women, albeit in variations. Saying women can be naturally is not radfem, it’s woman hating, it’s like saying some women are destined for PIV. And why not say some women are destined for prostitution?

in fact, you can transcribe the het debate to the prostitution debate. All feminists agree that prostitution is violence, it isn’t a choice, it’s got nothing to do with loving PIV, etc. Most feminists see that too with the institution of marriage – that we don’t marry with men because we choose it, men organise this to hold us captive to steal our reproductive and domestic labour, etc.

Why the resistance to seeing heterosexuality as a system of violence to which all women are groomed into? The fact that some women resist or escape the grooming/brainwashing to some degree (even if none escape some form or other of violence) doesn’t negate the fact that heterosexuality is just a system of violence and doesn’t exist as it’s defined by men (a sexuality).

I think I’ve provided enough evidence that emotional and sexual bonding to men is achieved only through violence and grooming. I’ve only covered sexual, physical and psychological abuse here as forms of coercion into heterosexuality.

I haven’t covered the economic aspect of heterosexuality, even though this is a minor aspect. Men create an artificial state of scarcity, they monopolise all means of survival, they monopolise the use of legitimate force, steal and claim ownership over all land, steal our labour, exclude us from all economic processes (which is based on death anyway) and force us to be dependent on them for our physical, financial survival. Men take away our autonomy, prevent us from being autonomous. This forces us to marry men or live with men to survive economically, which men use to force PIV on us – they know we can’t escape it because we’re dependent on them economically. There are so many ways in which we can see men’s coercion into heterosexuality.

Your article has been pissing off “het” radfems AND radical lesbians on facebook.
Apparently, stating that women do not choose to be invaded by men was “erasing lesbians”.
What seems not to erase lesbians is to state that “het” women are in fact collaborators. They *choose* to stay with men because they get tremendous privilege through it.
This is intersectionnality (poorly) disguised as radical feminism. And totally copies the “cis-privilege” transfolk are always whining about.
Since what kills women worldwide is male violence *within* heterosexual relationships, there cannot be a “straight privilege” that applies to both women and their captors equally.

LOL at pissing them off. Well if it pisses them off, then they haven’t understood the point, or rather, they still identify to male views of women’s oppression somehow. Something they don’t want to let go of. No women are being insulted here, all I’m saying is that heterosexuality doesn’t exist, just like “sex work” doesn’t exist. It’s a system of coercing women into being sexually owned and exploited by men. This is radical feminism and this is doing women justice.

Wow, yes indeed, saying “hets” are collaborators and benefit from it is totally the same thing as trannies accusing women of cis-privilege! That puts things in perspective really, that it’s such a reversal. Thanks for making that point. It also shows how radical lesbianism evinces THE basic tenet of feminism, that women are *oppressed* by men in the “private” sphere, DUH. that’s why I didn’t dwell on it in my post actually because i’m not going to lose my time explaining why women are oppressed by men, this is supposed to be the very basic understanding of feminism (let alone radical feminism), but even this point seems to be controversial, what a dire state in the non-movement.

Thanks very much! Very well-thought out article, witchwind. The “grooming” “pimping” “seasoning” language shows the relationship of prostitution and marriage (as varieties of the same institution of oppression). The analysis based on trauma-bonding makes a lot of sense. It’s so difficult to read this because of what it says to me about wasted years, years and years spent living in the middle of a world of deception. Like so many women, I look back now and all sorts of memories flood in that I could never “remember” before — because they were memories of humiliation, brainwashing, coercion, and violence against me. The combination of celibacy and reading essays like this is my way of moving forward as fast as possible into a clear and productive life focused around women.

I used to think I had a really privileged childhood in that i was lucky to have being raised without violence, with respect, etc. Just because my parents fed me and didn’t beat me every day. I didn’t understand why I was always unhappy and just thought i had a problem, i was shit inside.

Since I’m feminist i’ve started getting back to memories of violence and connecting the feelings of despair to my situation. And I understand now why i was so dissociated by the time men started to rape me (inflict PIV). Getting over the dissociation of the PIV is another thing though. While I’ve known for several years now that PIV is rape, the dissociation makes it hard to connect to the memories of it in an another form than the memory of the dissociation / genital arousal. Again, because of this I thought I was lucky, that I escaped quite a lot of male violence. I realised recently that the invasive images i had in my head was plain old PTSD. This realisation helped me see how violent my experience with men actually was.

It also helped to see that these weren’t my own fantasies but actual images of violence.

To recognise our experience as violence, it doesn’t help that violence is defined only as being hurt physically or threatened with physical violence: this is the male-centric, military manly-man definition of violence; it’s the image we have of violence when we think of violence, because this is what we are shown in newspapers or films when they talk about violence. We think of a man punching, holding a knife or a gun against us, etc. Because we have this image in our head when we think of violence, it makes it very difficult to recognise our experience as violence, because even if we are beaten or physically assaulted or physically tortured (not sexually), this is not what defines most our experience as women or girls. Psychological and sexual violence is rarely if never talked about as serious violence, when it is the most destructive form of violence first because it destroys from the inside, it annihilates our integrity and sense of self completely, and second, because it’s hidden, it’s most of the time a complete mindfuck and makes us dissociate, which creates this unconscious memory and as result we internalise the violence immediately. It makes think we want the violence or like when we go back to it or are unable to protect ourselves from it , this is a terrible weapon to destroy us internally and destroy all sense of self-worth and trust in ourselves. They force us to betray ourselves.

Most of our experience is the sexual abuse, every day physical and psychic violations but in appearance they might not have “forced” us physically with a gun, a knife held at our throat or with punching, even if they do sometimes. It is every day dehumanisation, debasement, humiliation, being treated like a possession, stripping us of all integrity and autonomy, the captivity, servility, mutilation but passed as “femininity”, mind-control, etc.

The fact is that men have such totalising control over us that very often they don’t need to resort to force to get us to do what they want from us. We are already terrorised and groomed to submit by years of ongoing violence.

Yes. Recently I have been remembering that my father used to beat me with a belt, with my pants down, as “discipline” or “punishment”. Finally I got old enough to scream at him that I’d kill him if he ever did that again. All my life I excused that (when I even could remember it, which was seldom) because he didn’t know better, really loved me even so, etc etc. It’s not the beatings I think about now, it’s my burying the beatings and excusing them.

There are so many other memories. Once, walking home from school alone along the railroad tracks, three boys came toward me. I was about 14. When they saw me they started snickering. I tried to get by them with my head ducked and eyes lowered. One of them grabbed my breast and squeezed it so hard I almost fainted. The pain was excruciating. They walked swiftly by, laughing, leaving me crying along the track. After that I was afraid to walk alone outside my whole life. I realized I was prey and that it was acceptable to injure me if I was caught outdoors alone. I do walk now, with a police flashlight and pepper spray, but I’m still not comfortable. And my experience I think is only the usual “seasoning” kind of experience. Again, what I think about now is that I never told anyone about this or the many other similar experiences. I was too ashamed. I ask myself why I was ashamed, and try to analyze the culture that taught me to be ashamed.

I really dont know what to say… it was a painful read, and that is not a negative statment towards the author. I think you made a good start in addressing a very complex subject. It is difficult to dig so deep into “the male mess” without producing a book’s worth of material, and almost impossible to explain its insidious-ness without the depth. There are so many offshoots, each of which deserves deep analysis, that it is overwhelming. This truth, “…men have such totalising control over us that very often they don’t need to resort to force to get us to do what they want from us. We are already terrorised and groomed to submit by years of ongoing violence.” can’t always be acted upon without naming all the many and specific acts of terror.

There is a difference between knowing you don’t enjoy PIV and knowing WHY you don’t enjoy PIV. Just as there is a difference in knowing you don’t enjoy PIV and knowing you don’t enjoy Het Sex. Then there is knowing you don’t enjoy Het Sex because you know WHY you don’t enjoy PIV. And there is probably more knowing beyond this around which my little brain has not yet wrapped its tentacles.

It takes time to gain knowledge. It must be gathered from many different sources. It must be deconstructed, reconstructed, analyzed and internalized. Then, to be of greater use, it must be applied.

Thank you for the time and effort you put into this. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Uh, that’s horrible what your father did / what those guys did. It’s good that the memories are coming back though. When memories come back after being forgotten, and we see the violence of it, it means we are healing.

This makes me think these are the exact same practices that men inflict on women in BDSM, or battery. Once men have done that to us as we were kids, it’s easier for them to do that to us when we are adults and call it “love”. Or make us make excuses for them.

@ pantypopo: I also find that each aspect of it opens to an infinity of more aspects to men’s violence. Even if in my head the system is quite clear, it’s almost impossible to describe with words and even in 3D drawings because it will always be reductive of the truth and entirety of men’s closed system of violence in which they hold us captive.

This is why I find that the only thing that renders a clear image of men’s totalising violence is discussions with women where we look into our experiences and share them and analyse them together, and all of a sudden, it’s like by adding each of these pieces of information together that a very complex but simple and clear images shores up in the middle of it, because of all the connections it created, and this is possible only through the exchange + exchange of analysis. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but this is the closest I have come to capturing the different circles of male violence in thought.

It took me much more time than usual to explain the things i wanted to say in this post, to keep focused on the primary message, stay concise and not get lost in each sub-point.

back to what you quoted from me: “men have such totalising control over us that very often they don’t need to resort to force to get us to do what they want from us. We are already terrorised and groomed to submit by years of ongoing violence.”

I’d add that because they’ve reached a point where they no longer need to resort to force as much (depending on the area, context, etc), and because we’ve forgotten or buried or suppressed a large chunk of the violence they subjected us to previously, it also makes it so much easier for them to deny the violence now and harder for us to see that it’s violence > hence dissociation.

For instance, if they only need to buy us a drink, smile at us and say two crappy lines like “you’re pretty” to get us to submit to PIV out of terror of displeasing him, then it’s so easy for them to say “she wanted it”, and for us to believe his lies, and not to be able to make the connection between our submitting to him /his violence now and all the previous violence and grooming. It’s even worse if we get genital stimuli from it.

Pantypopo, this: ” It is difficult to dig so deep into “the male mess” without producing a book’s worth of material, and almost impossible to explain its insidious-ness without the depth. There are so many offshoots, each of which deserves deep analysis, that it is overwhelming.”

That is wise and true, and Witchwind, you are really making a strong crack at it here.

So much of the tormenting nature of these explorations has to do with the extraordinary difficult of abstracting out the overall structure of this thing, but it has to be done, we have to see it in its totality. I do believe it could now be done in a single book, after these decades of gathering information and synthesizing it as well as possible. There are many books already written, but there is that piecemeal quality. Millett’s Sexual Politics is heavily oriented toward litcrit. Beauvoir is oriented toward describing female gender roles. Anthologies look at bits and pieces, like Anne Koedt’s fine gathering-together of second-wave feminist pieces in her anthology from the 70s. Daly and Dworkin were specialists in various aspects such as language, theology and pornography. Firestone advanced a single radical idea regarding reproduction. Dines has contributed greatly in the area of pornography, Jeffries has written on many topics including original analysis of the male gay movement on feminism. The lesbian experience is a huge field of analysis and study. McKinnon looks at law and sexual violence abroad. There are also the intuitive appraoches of artists such as the poets Rich and Lourde, and artists such as Judy Chicago. All of these approaches are crirtical, but one is still left with the feeling that there is a single root to be located that manifests in these many many branches. Witchwind, you and fcm and others are working hard on the root causes, which at the very bottom arise from biological differences IMHO, and I appreciate that so much.

I added a couple of my “bodily” experiences in my post above, in line with the notion that one cannot explain the insidiousness without the depth. We must abstract and theorize, but half that book that puts it all together is going to have to go into depth into our female bodies, the events upon events that occur with regard to our bodies which twist us into submission. SPECIFIC bodily injuries are the evidence of what is wrong and must always be recounted. Scientific studies and statistical analyses are not the base, they are one level up from the individual biographies which are the base. In other words, our theory is rooted in our bodily experience in human society, as McKinnon, attacking post-modernist “feminism”, has emphasized.

Feminism is not deductive – our theories do not start with a meta-view that then explains smaller events, though the meta-theory of patriarchy may confuse us into thinking that. It is inductive. It builds from the small events, upward to the meta-view. I do believe we are getting there. Thanks again for these contributions, Witchwind, and also for posting the study of male search terms.

I see that I haven’t even been able to start reacting to your specific points here, Witchwind. It has seemed to me that when essays like yours are written, one must first take a step backward, find the proper perspective, before one can even jump in. So apologies for not responding to the merits of your argument, I will continue reading and hope to make some further contribution.

Witchwind that was long indeed, but worth getting through. Did you know that we have a PIV Awareness Week going on on FB this week? You published this right after we launched it :) I don’t know if you had any idea, but in case you didn’t know, you caught your sisters’ wave right now. Lots of PIV posts and very heated threads have been started this week, and this article is being shared around. Not everyone agreed.

I do.

I’ve been having thoughts lately about women’s domestication on a long-term scale, not just from birth onwards. You know how domesticated dogs look? This hit me pretty hard cause I saw a dog yesterday that looked like a real wolf. Men killed off disobedient women and the wildest of our foresisters, the truly wild as hell spinters, probably didn’t breed with men because patriarchy. This had caused a literal domestication of female humans, I bet. Not for men. They can keep all the fucking crazy on their Y chromosome and in their whateverelse bio makeup. It’s really depressing to think of it, but what if we are the Poodles of human females? Look how small we are compared to men. How fucking docile. What were our foresisters like? Maybe they were as big or bigger than men. Maybe they weren’t even a little bit docile. Maybe they had very strong instincts. I read in From Eve to Dawn that the Amazons were reported to have cut off one of their own breasts so that they could draw a bow more easily. They were baddass warrior women.

Could our grooming be even a breeding process of domesticating us completely? Breeding the wild out of us? They control the breeding mechanisms completely and which women reproduce is ultimately in their control. If they choose the itsy bitsy docile types, this is what will proliferate.

I wasn’t aware of the PIV awareness week as I published this post, but I’ve heard of it from someone else!

I know there’s a woman scientist who published her phd thesis that women’s hips and bone size has been bred smaller over generations. Men typically select women who are much shorter and thinner than them. She says that because of this selective breeding, pregnancy and childbirth are more and more dangerous and painful for women because we have much narrower hips than we used to. She also says that the size differential between men and women is male-made, that is, selectively bred.

Humans breed dogs for different purposes. For instance they breed certain dogs for hunting, and others for different kind of servility. What’s certain is that the dogs that were groomed and bred in a certain way, they have that conditioning in their cellular memory somehow, and it’s passed down to the generations of the same race, who will show similar features. However I think it’s difficult to use animals as an example to understand women because we are the model on which they are groomed, not the opposite, and the psyche of each species is very different, so I wouldn’t infer too much from animals to humans.

However I see this breeding of docile women as part of intergenerational trauma, that is, PTSD transmitted from generations to generations. For instance, during the genocide of women in the middle ages by the catholic and protestant church, those women who were burned were those who resisted captivity to men and managed to escape their control to various degrees. The spinsters, lesbians, any woman who had some kind of status or power in the society, or who lived in a woman-only community. The survivors were either daughters of these burned and tortured women, who must have been terrified, or the daughters of those who were already held captive. We are the daughters of these women.

As to the amazons, I’m not inspired by the fact they cut their breasts. I find it’s a very violent self-mutilatory act. It’s sad they had to pay that sacrifice to defend themselves from the men. But it’s not something I would value, dismemberment. Men already dismember us enough.

I agree that feminism is inductive. Our knowledge, raised consciousness and therefore our liberation potential is located within ourselves and within exchanging between each other. Trusting ourselves, our perceptions and body responses, not suppressing our past, our wounds. At least it’s the beginning of liberation. Then who knows where it leads us.

I’m also glad there are some women out there trying to uncover the roots of men’s violence and maleness.

Yeah, thanks, witchwind, “Our knowledge, raised consciousness and therefore our liberation potential is located within ourselves and within exchanging between each other.”

I do feel the taproot is the body, and social constructions build on that. Many of those are so ancient and established that they feel natural to us.

This thing of feminism using inductive reasoning, is so important. Partly, the source is so deeply hidden, we have to take the million specific incidents to find it. I wonder what other philosophies are inductive. In general, male philosophies seem to be deductive; I will tell you my overall theory now, and fit your facts into it.

In this sense, Marx was an abstractor, a deductor, but Engels always talked about the actual lives of the millworkers and others. There are both elements in Marxism. I wonder sometimes if feminism, as the Ur-Oppression, is unique in being findable only by starting with biology. This mess having to do with het sex – you posit that there is no such thing as biologically-based, natural desire of a woman for a man. You make a very good case. I look ahead in that position and I see a discussion of female mammals. And I welcome it. I see how female mammals like elephants avoid the male except for strict procreational purposes. Look forward to reading your thoughts as they develop.

I wasn’t meaning to say that domesticating dogs came before domesticating women, just that we can see the effect from outside looking in if we consider how this has affected other animals. As the actual creature which has been bred to tameness over a few thousand years, having analogies might help us step outside our subjective reference point to see this from the outside, which could spawn new ways of looking at it. I know that when I try to imagine those women who came before, it does feel a little bit like trying to dig to the remnants of that wild woman in me, traces of her, which are left over. I guess for me the dog analogy might work better because I grew up with a breeder as as stepmom and learned a lot about the process by which the “wolf” is removed from the “dog.” The wild instinct of wolves is considered dangerous by men, because they are “unpredictable” and do not obey. Wolves are also physically stronger and harder to physically dominate, because they can take down a full-grown male human. This all sounds very familiar to me. They were bred to serve man and this was refashioned as them becoming “man’s best friend” in their own little romantic tale where servitude is disguised as mutual bonding. It’s interesting too that women were mythologized as spiritual equals to wolves in Women Who Run With Wolves. I think she saw the connection there too. My sister has had many wolf mixes over the years, and I remember one in particular. The first day I met him, I walked in the door and he rushed up to me. I froze. He put his paws up on my shoulders (he was HUGE) and looked intensely into my eyes. He had piercing green eyes. I just gazed back at this beautiful creature waiting for him to decide whether or not he felt comfortable with me. After a few minutes, he pulled back and gave me what I call a smile (in wolves or dogs) and walked with me into the house. My sister said that he doesn’t let everyone into the home. He was so PRESENT it was amazing. He was looking into my soul, reading me, interrogating my eyes. A dog might just bark incessantly at a new person in the house. Wolves are so different in so many ways. They command respect and do not see anyone as being a master over them. They require to be interacted with on equal terms….or else watch out! I can imagine men being very put off by that trait. ;)

As to our foremothers who were slaughtered for resisting, sure their daughters lived on, but some did not. Likely a lot of women have been over the years destroyed before they could pass down those genes and spinsters and lesbians might not have bred at all. I’m likely going to do my master’s thesis on the history of women burned as witches and the women who carry on that herstory today, because I am located in Germany at the moment, and there is a huge groundswell of underground witches who carry on traces of that history, but they remain mostly silent. However, on the last Beltaine, they did a march on the porn industry shouting (in German): “The witches are back! Women are not objects!” It was a huge march here, but I bet that didn’t make malestream news. That was amazing. It’s like they have lain silent and dormant for years and suddenly they made a big appearance. I hope it is true. I hope the witches are coming back. Together we can all weave back together the dismembered female, let us hope.

About the Amazons, yes, I agree it is gory and sad. I have a hard time putting it into full context. It seems like a value system of another universe. Today, being attractive is so important that no woman would ever mutilate herself to such a degree if it meant sacrificing the male gaze (the opposite is actually true). I guess this is what I find fascinating about it: there was a time when roves of women didn’t care about fuckability mandates at all. I don’t want us to start cutting ourselves up, but I would like to know what it feels like to be so free that you see your body completely as your own, and turning a man on doesn’t enter anywhere into the equation. I’m working on that still…made great progress this year, but I have a lot of dis-grooming yet to do.

Ufff long comment! Anyways, thanks for contributing to the PIV Awareness Week! Awesome post! It’s kicked up some dirt, which is totally good ;) And, sisterwitch, you totally caught our wave…or we caught yours….Mother had plans for the Furies this week it seems! I mean really….did we seriously all have an experience of communicating with each other as women without even talking? Cause it appears this is what just happened….

this post isn’t focused specifically on PIV though, but on what men call heterosexuality, that is the general system where men force their presence on us so they can enforce PIV/childbearing/labour on a continued basis. Sometimes this causes trauma-bonding and sometimes it won’t, but when we TB, it isn’t love or attraction. my point is that what we are made to believe is “love” or “sexual urges” towards men are only dissociation reactions to violence. I will narrow it down to strictly PIV later in the series but here the point is that heterosexuality is the institution that enables the violent enforcement of constant PIV/rape, and therefore, no woman is heterosexual. I looked at the important role of the patriarchal “family” and father/ parental abuse in men’s grooming of girls into “heterosexuality”.

perhaps the biology question is only relevant in this particular post to the extent that no woman is biologically destined to be violated by men, groomed and held captive. And maybe other female animals understand this better collectively than female humans because the males of other species don’t have that same capacity to manipulate, indoctrinate and groom all females, and create a very complex patriarchal system that holds females captive to them in ways we are to men. However I do think all women experience the unnaturalness, fakeness and violence of “heterosexuality” on a conscious level but they have to brush away those thoughts because any alternative appears too threatening or is too threatening (sometimes it might be death).

I find the wild / tame analogy very interesting though, Mary Daly used that all the time, i discovered it with her and I hadn’t thought it in those terms before, that wild simply meant non-tamed and groomed by human males instead of the negative image of wildness that men give to it, as nasty, chaotic and brutish.

I’m pretty confident that we are unrecognisable from what we used to be, physically as well as mentally. We’ve been crippled mentally, physically and in our sensory capacities for thousands or hundred thousands of years by men. However I don’t think we ever lived without men as human females, because maleness has been around for 3 million years if i remember well. Men were definitely already there as we evolved into modern human females. So our state has probably evolved from avoiding males and keeping them at bay, reducing their numbers / killing male babies or adult men / finding strategies to avoid PIV/rape/pregnancy as much as possible, to the current state of total captivity and imprisonment to men’s violent system of PIV enforcement and death-machine. We do know for a fact that patriarchy has spread and gotten worse over the centuries (see Gerda Lerner).

Unlike the relationship of animals to human males, where animals live(d) completely freely and wildly before being captured by human males (there’s a clear opposition from wild to tamed) human females and all females in relationship to the males of their species have never had a time where they were completely male-free; therefore, completely free from male threat, male invasion, colonisation, vampirism, parasitism.

it demonstrates quite well the difference between men’s foreground and lies (ie heterosexuality, attraction to men – but in this case, “therapy”) and the reality of women’s background: more violence, coercion, destruction by men, men using women’s previous trauma and abuse to abuse us more and assert control over us.
Followed by recovery ONLY through female bonding based on telling the truth about what we endured and survived by men.

“Heterosexuality” and “love” or “attraction” to men is part of men’s false foreground, the world of smoke and mirrors and deception, the photos of a smiling, happy-looking couple to hide the reality of the abuse behind, the make-up and fake happy smiley demeanour men force women to wear, all the “therapies” men trap women into, to wipe out and erase the evidence of men’s crimes.

What an incredible story about Anna O! Inspiring! It’s a wonderful balance to the many many tragic stories of what happened to women subjected to “analysis” such as Ellen West’s failed analysis by Ludwig Binswanger.

I just wanted to say one thing about Freud in response to WWs question about why radfems would have anything to do with his theories. If you disregard EVERYTHING he said about women, since his greatest and really criminal failure was his inveterate sexism, which has harmed so many women seeking therapy to this day, then you are left, I believe, with some very valuable analysis of men, the sex he did understand and I think brilliantly analyzed. Freud in later life introduced the theory of a Death Drive or destructive drive, and explain its presence in men, especially in his book Civilization and its Discontents. This discovery has helped me formulate my own understanding of male violence at a deep level. I realize I’m in the minority among feminists in accepting anything from Freud, btw.

Karen Horney was a Freudian analyst who broke with Freud over his theories about women. She attacked the Electra complex and much other garbage Freudian theory. She had impeccable credentials and was a very good writer. She demonstrated great courage and integrity in confronting Freud and he wrote respectfully about her work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney Today we may think she didn’t go far enough, but we have to remember she was breaking ground.

I sometimes think that in working through the structure of the patriarchy as it is incorporated within individuals, we have done terrific work on analyzing the social construction part (and there’s always more work to be done), and we are finally working our way out of the fear of examining biological bases of human behavior, but there may be one area that we haven’t fully brought into focus yet, and that’s the area some call “deep psychology”, an area of child development that bridges biology and social construction, the place where the notions of deep language structures, archetypes, and the unconscious are looked at. It’s a minefield because Freud appropriated this area and stuck in the gigantic white elephant of the Oedipus complex, and then Jung jumped in there too. But even though this area of the human body/psyche is very difficult to explore for those reasons, women psychological theorists are doing that, and I’d like to see a radfem analysis of some of their work. I think it might be necessary as a link that brings the female body back into its proper connection with the mind.

W4, thanks for your comments about wolves – I really learned something interesting from you there.

Sorry, I meant “Depth Psychology” in the comment above. It has to do with “biosocial” psychology, a word that does explain the concept. This area of psychology is utterly overrun by men right now. But that’s not a new story.

What I’m thinking is that this seeming female desire toward men (for those of us who describe ourselves as heterosexual) has such strong connections in both biology (the basic sex drive) and social pressure, that it may be situated in the unconscious, “biosocial” mind more than either biology OR strictly social constructs.

Why should we care if that’s true? Well, I think that makes it a lot harder to see and deal with, which is why Witchwind’s insightful essay here is of special importance. It’s a fundamental issue for feminist theory, this alleged irresistible sexual attraction to men (affecting most but certainly not all women). It has been a very knotty issue, since I don’t think any feminist thinker questions that there is a biological sex drive. If heterosexuality is part of that biology, how could we ever separate? How can we disentangle from institutions like marriage? How can we deny ourselves something “natural”?

But if women’s heterosexuality is the narrowing of a broad biological drive, impressed on her as part of a girl’s socialization, then we CAN disentangle without doing our natures any harm.

If it is shown, as Witchwind argues (along with other radfem thinkers such as FactCheckMe), to be constructed and hidden and subject to social change, rather than entirely biologically-based (the current patriarchal stance), I think we may be at the root. The huge implications of this constant pressure into engaging in PIV intercourse become clearer. I see that there will be more on PIV intercourse here and look forward to reading that.

Just one other note on not throwing the Freudian baby out with the dishwasher – he astonished the world by announcing that we are born pansexual, let’s not forget that.

I think men always say some amount of truth about themselves, except that you have to decrypt it amongst all the projections, reversals and lies. For example pornography doesn’t say the truth about women but it says what men are, what they think, what they project on women and how they relate to women, the way they treat women and how they conceive of this, their capacity to lie and revert or erase their responsibility, etc. I don’t think men are capable of thinking outside their own paradigms so the world they describe is necessarily a description of their own mind and own world and values, it’s a tautology. Even they themselves might not understand themselves properly.

I really have no respect for Freud and we honestly don’t need him to uncover the truth about men. There is only dirt in that water and the modicum of truth he might have said was probably uncovered by women which he then plagiarised, as we can see with Anna O. We know that men are necrophiliac. I think Freud’s term “death drive” is just another way of naming men’s necrophilia / rapism, which has been far better described by radical feminists such as Mary Daly. I don’t think it’s a black, sordid essence contained in the deep insides of each man though, I think maleness simply causes a deficiency in internal / external sensory or neuronal connectivity, which we have evidence for, and which creates a ground for violence / rapism. And that this lack of sensitivity is connected to the fact that they tend to experience things only through erections or similar forms of it. And I don’t think this is the cause but the symptom of maleness, because maleness is maleness, the cause for maleness lies probably in other spheres, such as early, primitive genetics mutations, or cosmic fields, or whatever. Sonia Johnson argues that there’s nothing to understand about maleness other than that’s it’s a huge mistake, a mutation. I’m not sure about this, I can’t confirm or infirm it yet, I have yet to explore many hypotheses before narrowing things down.

Freud certainly has nothing of interest to say of women, apart certain PTSD symptoms he observed in female rape victims and which the women described themselves, which he then warped and perverted and projected men’s own fantasies onto. Reading his work is like picking through a garbage can, just like it feels when you read “men’s search terms”. We certainly don’t need him either to understand ourselves and the various PTSD symptoms we suffer from as a result of men’s violence. And we better not use his ideas for our own sanity, because direct routes to ourselves are far healthier than when it’s mediated by male lechery.

While trauma-bonding might be a biological process, it’s certainly only natural to the extent that it’s a natural survival reaction to violence : I wouldn’t use the word social construction, which downplays completely the constant state of terror in which men put us to achieve this result. We aren’t socially constructed but groomed through violence. This isn’t about “norms” but about men annihilating and persecuting women.

If you say that most feminist thinkers don’t question the fact there is a natural biological sex drive, especially towards men, than that is a very dire state for feminism. I think questioning the so-called “attraction” to men is one of the foundation of radical feminism.

Great post. I really want to leave a longer comment but I need to think about it more, it’s a lot to take in.

For now, just a thought on trauma bonding – casual sex with many men better facilitates trauma bonding to men as a class than does the private property model. In the latter, strange men at least are still supposed to be scary, i.e. rape/death threats. Only a few men (friends/family), and expert men I suppose (doctors etc), are supposed to be trustworthy. Women are kept in check through economic and political constraints which physically restrict their freedom – there is less need then to bond emotionally to men as a class, because trauma bonding isn’t the major mechanism to keep women dependent. It’s there, but there are harder constraints, which are also more obvious to the woman in question. It’s a more honest oppression, if you would want to put it like that! More visible, anyway.

But ‘free love’ means any man can be a potential fuck so a huge proportion are seen through the eyes of the eroticised trauma bond. And this is necessary b/c women have more formal freedoms – so trauma bonding becomes the central mechanism. In fact, I have just been reading ‘The Spinster and her Enemies’ by Sheila Jeffreys, and she talks about how the current way of thinking about sex was formulated by male sexologists and psychs in response to the radical feminism of the late 19th and early 20th century, which served to naturalize intercourse. In fact these men very explicitly saw intercourse and women’s sexual pleasure in it as a means of preventing feminism and tying women’s loyalties to men.

what stands out for me here (well one thing anyway!) is the part about being “owned” by our parents and how traumatic this is for girls in particular (of course). and how its all part of the larger context of (male) violence, where harm reduction is our only option but this is never acknowledged or addressed. i remember my dad once telling me that if i ever got abducted i should make myself as unappealing to the kidnapper as possible by wetting/soiling myself. and once at a theme park he said that it was important that we never get “separated” bc if this happened, he might never see me again. before this, i didnt consciously realize how dangerous it was “out there” but after that, i could never forget. not that these messages werent out there on TV already, but him directly saying it (and it was the truth BTW) made it very obvious! the result was as you say: the fairly horrific circumstances of our family were obviously preferable to what was lying in wait “out there.” of course, what was “out there” was men, and male sexual and reproductive abuse (including kidnapping and sexual slavery) of girls and women, but to frame it in a truthful way that implicated men wouldve actually been helpful and thats hardly the point of grooming now is it?

“If you say that most feminist thinkers don’t question the fact there is a natural biological sex drive, especially towards men, than that is a very dire state for feminism. I think questioning the so-called “attraction” to men is one of the foundation of radical feminism.”

I just want to clarify that I agree that the naturalness of “attraction” to men is a fundamental issue. It’s the main point of your essay to show how it is imposed, of course. I merely said that I don’t think we question the existence of a biological sex drive (which may well be pansexual). I think we have to start with that as a bedrock and try also to explain why men seem to become majority heterosexual and therefore impose that heterosexuality on women.

Or are we talking about men not being heterosexual either, saying this is solely about forcing reproduction without lust, and that male lust for intercourse with women is not “natural” either? Are we saying that men are born pansexual also, but are also constructed into heterosexuality? How does this crazy situation come about that is so destructive, where men kill and torture and frighten women into submitting to something unnatural? Why are men seemingly heterosexual, but not women?

As for any possible utility of psychoanalysis, I understand your reluctance to even engage with the mess Freud made, and to rely instead on the analyses of feminists thinkers like Daly and Rich. Still, what you’re talking about is how female heterosexuality is introduced and coerced (and resisted by many women, including especially lesbians). I hope I’m not misstating your position in saying that you argue that there is no natural female heterosexuality to start with, it is entirely imposed. You are looking at the system by which it is imposed. That’s the life’s work of a lot of women psychoanalysts who did sift through Freud’s mess, and I think I need to read them for whatever their experiences may be worth, even if it’s to refute most of what they say in the end. They locate the imposition early in childhood and try to explain how the experience of heterosexuality becomes unconscious and therefore feels “natural”.

I think their work only adds to yours. It seems to me that you are all writing about how heterosexuality is internalized in women, but you are doing even more, you are concentrating on the violent societal enforcement mechanisms that invade women’s consciousnesses before they are internalized into the unconscious.

You said, “We aren’t socially constructed but groomed through violence.” I’m confused by that. I thought your article was about how we are socially constructed into feeling heterosexuality is “normal”, by the use of violence and threat of violence. Isn’t grooming a way of socially constructing us? Sorry if I misunderstood.

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Rididill, seems to me your comment about how the rise of casual sex is a new mechanism of heterosexual coercion, in reaction to the winning of some formal freedoms for western women, is a very helpful insight.

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FCM, your dad’s statements to you are good examples of this “grooming” by terror. He was the good guy just trying to help by letting you know how to avoid the worst of the violent enforcements, so you could be cowed into submission by implied threats rather than physical injury. All of us can look back at this process and once we see it, it can’t be ignored that that’s exactly what is going on.

@ oserchenma: What I meant by groomed instead of socially constructed is simply that social construction doesn’t necessarily imply violence. It’s a sociology term to say that things are not innate but constructed by humans through social regulations or norms. Norms aren’t inherently oppressive, for instance we may have a norm whereby we are attentive to and respect each other’s needs and boundaries. Where destruction and raping is forbidden. Where we take only as much as we need, and don’t accumulate for the sake of accumulation, to control other people.

The word social construction is male-centric because men aren’t necessarily oppressed by male norms. They might be to a certain extent because there are power differentials between men, but essentially male norms serve all male interests.

So this is why i choose to say grooming instead of social construction because the word “grooming” is explicit about the violence in it. It’s inherently violent, carried out through continued acts of violence and brainwashing.

The imposition of heterosexuality, or that is, of viewing all (threatening) men as potential fucks, is certainly forced into the unconscious at childhood, before we can defend ourselves from it.

And I really like the insight that what increases TB is the fact we view men as potential fucks instead of as rape threats. Or that men as rape-threats are translated as potential fuck, because there needs to be a real threat for trauma-bonding to exist. They groomed us to dive into danger instead of getting away from it.

I was NEVER told that men were dangerous. I think this does make a small difference, even if it’s just viewing *some* men as rape threats, whereas others, because in different contexts, are viewed as potential fucks or “friends”.

On the other hand, this thing where you are taught that the men outside your home are really big threats, increases emotional dependency on our most dangerous oppressors: fathers, husbands, brothers, boyfriends…

Thanks Witchwind, I see your objections to the use of “social constructions” now.

As to when heterosexuality gets inculcated, maybe the whole answer will be that there’s a big push for small girls, to get their initial sexual differentiation and orientation introduced, and then there’s the constant reinforcement for the rest of her life, with another special push at puberty.

Along the lines of Rididill’s comment – tactics are changing as women obtain “formal legal” rights – R, you mention the big sex-pos push. I’d like to suggest that the violence is also becoming more blatant now, more exposed anyway, as western women obtain formal legal rights.

In the past other coercions (where violence was only implied) were almost as frightening, and they’re still effective, but not as effective as before, which I think is bringing up the underlying naked violence – “You’ll be a prostitute if you don’t marry” – “But women aren’t allowed to support themselves! No one will hire you.” – “I’ll disown you and you’ll starve” – “You can’t have credit or own property” – “No self-respecting graduate school would accept women” – “You’re crazy, staying single is insane and I’ll have you committed” – “Either marry or bury your life in a nunnery” – etc. All these older tactics are still hideously effective in non-Eurocentric countries, PLUS violence, to this day.

You know, I have done a whole lot of reading and studying about violence against women over the past few years. In the mainstream press I keep reading that violence is down – that women are safer. At the same time the specific serial kidnappings and ex slavery and trafficking and rapes and wife-killings fill the news. I’m thinking that there’s a doublespeak problem here, a disconnect where we’re being asked to swallow a “trend” that isn’t true.

I haven’t written back to you yet, but I just wanted to say that I completely agree with what you’re getting at with heterosexuality 100%. I think I tend to see so much overlap with heterosexuality and PIV that I conflate them as nearly the same thing, because heterosexuality to me is the mythology and PIV is the ritual, like Christianity and going to church….I am actually talking about both things with either word when I say PIV/heterosexuality. But since we are still at a time when this isn’t how these concepts are generally viewed, I should probably be more precise when I talk about the two things. (and when we don’t give men PIV, they lose all “romantic” interest, so this just tells me that heterosexuality = doing PIV, and on their terms)

I also wonder about whether or not we were ever free from males. Good point there….so much herstory has been erased and so much of it is simply lost with time. Whatever fierceness we have built into us, it seems men are determined to at least *think* they can kill it off and out of us, i.e. the burning times and all worldwide ongoing neverending femicide in all its forms.

But a truly female-only, male-free safe zone where we can develop without their influence is unheard of, I think you’re right.

Wait, what about the Isle of Lesbos? And the Amazons? And the early Christian women were lesbian/celibate separatists from the males (before the males forced them to live separate.).

About any female-only community that ever existed: yes there were only women in their community but they weren’t free from the threat of male invasion. Men were still around the land, human males still existed in very large numbers. The amazons in fact were very famous for having defended themselves against male invasion. That means men must have tried to rape them and conquer their land quite a lot. And in fact if men hadn’t eventually invaded the amazons, lesbians (from lesbos) and beguines and others, these communities would probably still exist and survive today.

However, the good news is that there are species where the males have died out already, like a particular kind of mole (thanks Delphyne for that info).

Oh, gosh, we need to ask our sister moles how they pulled that off. They must have had a really good liberation movement ;)

And yes definitely the Amazons had to have been killed off. That’s what I mean though. If they were of a different or wilder “breed” so to speak, they would be eliminated eventually, because women like that do not serve the patriarchy, and only women who are good for male use are spared death. Which means only the most submissive of women would be forced to breed, while the others would be killed off for their uppity crimes of being too sure that they’re human beings.

Then again….could all be latent in us. Our sheer ability to survive in these circumstances is a testament to the strength and intelligence of females who have made it this far down the line (that and random chance, too). We may have been bred to domestication, but it could perhaps be seen as us being bred into a more and more cunning and adaptable creature in order to navigate the hell-on-Earth terrain men have set out as our lot. All this pent up energy coupled with a stamina and will to survive at all costs, extreme adversity, and constant need for outsmarting our oppressor could also be breeding us in a direction of increased critical intelligence. Maybe we’ll eventually reach the breaking point (could be what the relatively recent waves of feminism have been about) and start figuring out how to resist without getting killed right away. Heterosexuality needs to be outed for the scam that it is! All those creepy looking dudants have been raping women for far too long.

THIS IS A BRILIANT PIECE OF WORK. BRILLIANT. BRAVO! Your CLARITY, Radical Wind, is astonishing. Thank you for pushing Radical Feminism in the exact direction we need to go. I am shocked to see how many women in this Resurgence are entangled with men, and spend their time attacking Post-Man Radfems as if we are even, yes, “crazy.” I have even seen your superlative piece of work here treated as “completely unreasonable” by some women in “The Radfem Theory Group.” (Which is anything but Radfem). Women seem to defend their “investments” in men with the same level of personal assassination that men defend their right to porn (ie their right to hurt women with impunity). I suppose this could be explained by trauma-bonding. But at some point in the liberation process, a woman has to make a choice. Or it isn’t liberation.

Please keep writing. Radical Feminism must be pushed in the right direction, — without being derailed this time.

There’s not much I can really say, but wow good post.I always knew romantic love was a joke, and I like you probably was always curious as to what it was. Being someone who’s had limited experience with men in romantic/sexual relationships, I never had let myself to become too open to feeling loved. Because I knew whatever I was feeling was the erasure of myself, and the colonization of a man.And that men can easily turn off this “love” switch and discard a woman like a rag, when they loose interest or would rather be doing something else.

I don’t believe that any many truly cares about any woman. This prejudice towards men has never served me wrong. It’s true, and it’s saved me from becoming more emotionally damaged than I could be.

I always identified as het. But I never saw it as a legit term to define my sexuality.Women don’t need men for sexual satisfaction Sure, PIV is pleasurable, but the political and social prices are not worth it.

Might I add, that even women ( like me) who’ve felt a deep desire for piv, are deeply influenced by trauma bonding like you have stated.Many women are deeply isolated by many societal institutions such as race, and class and feel sex is the only “affection” they can take from their oppressors. So they easily fooled by “nice” men, and spread their legs easily because they are so flattered to have someone adore them- or they believe that those men have looked pass the societal barriers that enchained them and actually like them. Which is false.

A lot of radical feminist argue that piv is okay when you are a radical feminist, but it really is a political act. And when you do it you are submitting and being submitted to male domination.

I notice through my own experience, since I can’t have relationships with men, I’d try to supplement that with letting them fuck me and pretending everything was mutually beneficial, when it really isn’t. I was never as satisfied as them, and they all seem to have this notion that sex is centered around their dicks and their ehaculation. I also have been publicly molested by a boyfriend and tortured into letting him do it.He’d threaten me that If I didn’t let him touch my boobs and body in public that he’d end it, and I was so comfortably uncomfortable with him that I didn’t protest. I was seduced by “love”.

Penetration is always forced. When i’d decline piv sex, he’d rape me in a different way, mouth, ass, etc. And that it was all about getting him off.If I wasn’t interested in having sex he’d somehow always lead me to his house far away from home, so that i had no choice but to.Sometimes he wouldn’t let me leave until I had had sex with him. Thats why i learned to just give into it, even desire it to make myself feel a false sense of control and empowerment, when everything was centered around his dick.

I had no idea I was being taken hostage, raped, forced, and MAN-ipulated into being his sexual property. I dissociated myself from reality, and pretended everything was equal and consenting. I felt good getting fucked, because I liked to show everybody that I was cool and likeable. But at the same time I was terribly uncomfortable and nervous around him because of his violent outbursts, and his constant monitoring of my outer appearance. I struggled to stay in my head, and witnessed my close female friend become less close. We only got back to gether when she too discussed the terrors of her piv sexual experiences.

Men will fuck you up, that’s why I choose to be a lesbian.I dream of one day that we will live in a world where all sex is mutually beneficial, egalitarian, and fulfilling. Where piv sex is based on communication and adherence to the authority of the female. Where piv isn’t sex, but a sexual option, a part of sex that isn’t at the top of the hierarchy.\

Heterosexuality is a forced choice, but lesbianism is also a liberating choice for many of us. So I don’t see why any lesbians would get angry at someone choosing to be lesbian, unless they are misogynists themselves.

“Where piv sex is based on communication and adherence to the authority of the female. Where piv isn’t sex, but a sexual option, a part of sex that isn’t at the top of the hierarchy”

I don’t endorse this statement at all as it is pro-PIV, or doesn’t make any sense. Please review your position on PIV if you want to continue to comment here. radical feminists seek the abolition of PIV and liberation from men and male violence / invasion, not “egalitarian sex with men”.

Lesbianism isn’t necessarily liberating. It can even be anti-liberating. I wouldn’t urge all women to jump blindly into lesbian relationships as most of the time it reproduces the male template of possession and invasion.